“It did not take five minutes” for our proposal to be accepted by Guy Cocheval, the president of the Musée d’Orsay, reports Jean Clair. It was then assembled very quickly: 475 pieces were gathered in a record time.

“From the moment you have 45 severed heads, 33 detached limbs, phrenological skulls, a guillotine blade and a bunch of symbolic pictures, it was necessary to organize all this in sections so that it could be readable by an uninformed public.”, continues the art historian.
“The abolition of the death penalty was the fundamental foundation from which we started,” he added. At the end of the first room stands the guillotine, veiled in black but with a clearly visible blade. It was a blood freezing vision.

“This is the first time we have dared to show such an atrocious object in an art museum,” Clair said. “The real object is more shocking than all the representations we have made of it,” he said.

Guy Cocheval acknowledged that he was “not very keen to show such an object” but that he had been convinced.

Another striking object, the door to death row, loaned by the Penitentiary Museum of Fontainebleau., the prisoners awaiting capital punishment carved on the wood, with sharp objects, inscriptions such as «farewell Frisette», «no luck» dated 1899, 1911 etc…